Study Linking Abortion and Mental Health Issues Debunked

A study that claims that abortion can cause mental health issues has been debunked by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

“This is not a scholarly difference of opinion; their facts were flatly wrong. This was an abuse of the scientific process to reach conclusions that are not supported by the data,” says Julia Steinberg, an assistant professor in UCSF’s Department of Psychiatry. “The shifting explanations and misleading statements that they offered over the past two years served to mask their serious methodological errors.”

The biggest problem? The study didn’t distinguish between mental health issues prior to abortion and those that occured following the procedure, but still claimed the issues were linked to abortion.

That the editor of the journal wrote a piece that basically repudiates the original study and finds the Steinberg & Finer analysis persuasive (and that piece was co-authored by the guy who runs the federal study upon which Coleman’s analysis was based). Decisive debunking, indeed! Praise be to Steinberg & Finer for bringing this to light and setting the record straight.